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thy face, and inform thee triumphantly, that if antecedently no fitness or reason had existed, yet both reason and fitness sprang up full-grown when he overthrew and smote thee.

Peterborough. Famous illustration.

Penn. Sneer not at what prelacy holds the most pertinaciously of her doctrines, and what, if thou wilt not swallow it from the pulpit, thou must gulp from the drum-head. Nay, Mordaunt, with all thy pride, impetuosity, and disdain, thou, even thou art the liveryman of this gardener: yea, thou who wert indignant to be designated as his master. Inconsistent creature!

Peterborough. It is something to have an influence on the fortunes of mankind: it is greatly more to have an influence on their intellects. Such is the difference between men of office and men of genius, between computed and uncomputed rank.

Penn. Thou art not among those who place Fortune above Nature, and the weakest work of the weakest mortals above the greatest work of Deity in his omnipotence. It is generous in thee to acknowledge what it would be expected from thee to deny, if thou wert not higher than a garter could lift thee.

Peterborough. I should be as mean as a man of fashion if I disallowed it, and as silly as a president of the council if I attempted to dissemble it. Only the first personage in the kingdom should be unenlightened and void, as only the first page in a book should be a blank one. It is when it is torn out that we come at once to the letters.

Your complimentary terms shall not preclude me from an attack on you, now we are away from your garden and gardener. You also in manners and regimen have your inconsistencies.

wherein the swells of their sorrows and the irregu larities of their other affections may subside and sweeten. This practice remains with them through life. I see no similitude in it to that of the papist, when all the confidence a young man places in his father, and a young woman in her mother, is considered by the priest as not among the duties of life, unless both of them come before him, and submit the tenderer and purer mind to his hardened and intrusive touch. He tells them such confession, and such only, is necessary to their happiness in a future state. God, he says, accepts it not as a merit, but as an atonement: those who have been injured may be passed aside : he himself acts for these, without seeing them, without communicating with them, without making them reparation, without rendering them account.

Peterborough. There are creatures brought from other countries, as these priests were, and exhibited in fairs and markets and festivals (and wherever men and money are idly tossed about), as these priests are, which superintend each other's polls with much care and cunning, as these priests do, and pick out from them, and put between their grinders, the minute generations of incommodious things springing up innumerably from pruriency and scurf. What thinkest thou? Thinkest thou that these animals, the bigger or the smaller, do the same for cleanliness? No; they do it for eating, as these priests do.

Penn. Inconveniences there may be in our manners, but not to us: inconsistencies there may be in our government, but not ours are those. In this country, where we are left to ourselves, we reconcile them gradually or remove them peaceably.

Peterborough. If they were serious, and in your Penn. Let us correct them: we can do it, and native country, you would find your religious are ready what are they?

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Peterborough. I am not captious by nature, nor over-nice.

scruples an impediment to every such exertion. Penn. Thy difference to modes of worship and to articles of faith is founded on the principle, I suppose, that a virtuous man will be virtuous in

Penn. Thou beginnest well. Peterborough. Really I am almost ashamed to any of them. take exceptions at mere words.

Penn. Better and better.

Peterborough. I will not spare you then. On my conscience, I do not see why your people, in reality so sincere, should use expressions in which there is no sincerity. Friend, on all occasions, is an abuse. A friend is a creature now extinct: we read of its petrified bones in distant regions, and those who would represent its figure in their persons, resemble it only in its petrifaction.

Penn. We call every man our friend because we wish to be every man's. Thou hast not found friendship in certain places, because thou wert looking for something else. Take virtue with thee, and thou wilt either find it or not want it. Here thou art as unfair with us as thou wert on excommunication, of which I will now explain to thee our employment.

We admonish our younger brethren to omit no opportunity of pouring their ill actions and ill thoughts into quieter and more capacious minds,

Peterborough. Unquestionably.

Penn. What maketh him virtuous ? Peterborough. His inclination: the current and quality of his blood.

Penn. Hast thou reflected so little as not to know that inclinations are given by discipline and habit; and that the quality and current of the blood are as much to be modified by indulgence or coercion, as they are by pepper or hemlock. I would never try to arouse thy soul from the only state of languor it is subject to, did not this indifference to externals, as thou callest them, cover in almost every breast (and might hereafter in thine) an equal indifference to what lies deeper. But, the thing being so, rise from thy apathy, from thy lethargic trance, if true courage, or even if false, be within thee! Away to Piedemont; away to the people of the Valley! Doth the sword charm thee? doth blood thrill thee? or hath it lost its voice with thee when it crieth unto God? Thousands had been cast into infected prisons;

yea, seventeen thousands. Winter stepped in between the pestilence and them; and those whom the ice had not fastened to the floor were at last in number three thousand; when it appeared to their prince to be a costly matter, and an offence to the Virgin, to feed any longer these heretics. Scourged from their dungeons, bayoneted from their country, they traverse Geneva; they reach Berne. Not houses nor lands nor brotherly love, nor compassion, so sweet a stranger to them, so long unlooked for, could detain them there, nor the only alluring one of interdicted pleasures (for such it had ever been to them) the blessed communion of Christian faith. Their grain was growing yellow on its stalk, when they assembled by night in the wood of Nyon. The boldest of human enterprises was undertaken on the sixteenth of the eighth month, in the year of our redemption sixteen hundred and eighty-nine.

I designate the year particularly, although two have not since elapsed, because the existence of these persecuted men appears to be one of those glorious actions which both contemporary and future annalists may overlook. For History is now become as fond as Poetry ever was of the violent and powerful, and much more contemptuous of low condition. She loves better great nations than great actions, great battles than great examples, and is ready to emblazon no name under which she descries no shoulder-knot. Of these holy men, pursued like wolves, but never dropping in their flight the ark of true religion, fewer than nine hundred climb the hostile mountains of Savoy. Prudence and Justice guide them in their path: they pay their cruel enemies for everything needful, out of a pittance insufficient for perhaps another day. Between Suze and Brianson, at the bridge of Salabertrans, they are opposed by two thousand five hundred regular troops, and by a numerous armed peasantry. The bridge is barricaded: a battle of two hours renders them masters of this position. Weary with their conflict, hungered (for now those among them who had money can procure no subsistence with it, the peasantry being in the field against them), they still pursue their march, and attain the summit of the highest mountain on the road.

Why have they fallen on the earth? and wherefore are they praising God? Because they see again the land that nurtured them in the strength of holiness, the rafters (for some are unconsumed) of the churches wherein their parents were united, and the elder-tree in full flower upon their graves. Orchards and gardens had disappeared: flocks there were none, nor any beast whatever. The villages were to be conquered from the invader: in another day not a trace remained of them, excepting two black lines, where the fire had run along. Reduced at last to four hundred combatants, they threw up strong entrenchments, and resisted until winter the repeated assaults of their increasing enemies. Early in the spring an army of twenty-two thousand men attacked them, and was repulsed. Eight days afterward the entrench

ment was cannonaded and bombarded, and there was on every side a pertinacious and most desperate assault. This too failed: but as the ill-constructed parapet was laid in ruins, they escaped down the precipices by night, amid the sentinels of the beleaguerer, and posted themselves at some distance, in the Pré du Tour, a small plain surrounded by the wildest mountains, where their ancestors like themselves had displayed such courage, as never was exhibited in any region of the earth, by any other portion of the human race.

Peterborough. Are you not ashamed of being so eloquent?

Penn. I know nothing of oratory: I carry no piece of tape to measure periods; but reflection shows me that the greater part of the most eloquent books that ever were written, might with more advantage be cast into the ovens of Paris and London, than placed in the hands of the young and inconsiderate. Philosophy, whatever it may do hereafter, has done little good at present and History has reserved all her applauses for the destroyers of mankind. Point out to me one single schoolmaster or professor, in any age, who has not applauded the speech of Alexander to Parmenio that if he were Parmenio he would sheathe the sword. Was the man so besotted as not to see clearly that Parmenio spoke in the interests of humanity and in the opinion of all nations, and that he himself spoke not even in his own interests, and directly against the well-being of the world.

Peterborough. What an unfortunate man was Ludlow, not to have been present at the battles of these brave fellows! He left their vicinity just before, and came into England, hoping to end his days among us. I met him in Westminster-abbey the morning of that memorable sitting when Sir Edward Seymour, who enjoyed the general's estate at Maiden Bradley, moved the house of commons for an address to the king, praying that he should be arrested. Whiggism prevailed: and the soundest and sincerest friend of liberty went again into exile for the constancy of his attachment.

I was struck by the manly, calm, unassuming, military air, of a robust and fresh-coloured man, about seventy years of age, who stood before me with his eyes fixed downward on one spot. Being neither very shy, nor more disposed to balk my curiosity than my other propensities, I bowed to him respectfully, and expressed my persuasion that whoever was interred there, merited the sympathies of the nation.

"Young gentleman," answered he mildly, "you do not know, apparently, whose bones have lain here?"

Certainly not, sir," I replied; "but probably many men's in many ages: for, whatever may be the respect which, in this place above others, is paid to the deceased, it will not ensure to their bones an undisturbed and permanent station."

"If it could," replied he, "surely those of the most prudent, humane, intelligent commander,

that ever led Englishmen to victory, would not property, most of my days, all of my thoughts, have been disinterred."

"The felonious Stuarts and their insatiable jackals," cried I, "prowled after rotten carcasses, and had more stomach to lap congealed blood than to fight for fresher. And there are sycophants yet among us who would excite our commiseration for their chastisement. The same fellows, next week, will be just as loyal and religious in extolling the powers that be."

He seemed neither to notice my expressions nor to partake in my emotion, but, laying his hand gently on my shoulder, said, gravely and tenderly, "Even generous enthusiasm leaves men sometimes ungenerous. We have removed the evil; let us pardon and forget it. Let us imitate, as far as we can, him whom we ought rather to think on than on the Stuarts. We are treading the ground that covered Blake; the man of men."

Roused to higher enthusiasm by his calmness than I could have been by his eloquence, if he had any, I seized him by the hand, and swore by God the eulogy was merited and true.

Penn. And God will forgive thee; for though thou didst (as many wise men will tell thee) take his name in vain, never was it taken in adjuration less in vain than then. Some admirals have maintained the glory of England; some have increased it he found it lower than that of Holland, of Spain, or even of France, and raised it by his genius and valour far above them all. The hope is more reasonable that we may never want such men again than that we shall ever see them.

Peterborough. Hold! friend William ! With your leave, I will entertain both hopes alike; little as is the probability that, if any admiral shall equal him in the union of nautical skill and moral bravery, the same person will be equally grave, disinterested, dispassionate, humble, and tenderhearted. I agree with you that no fighting man was ever at once so great and so good a man as Blake and since History does not inform us that there has been, Reason does not encourage us to believe that there will be at any time hereafter but Hope may whisper when these are silent. In all ages, party and self are the prime movers of human action, and never were they more busy than in the whole of his lifetime. Firm as he was in the principles of republicanism, he belonged to no party, and was as far removed from selfishness as from faction. He declined the honours of the state, he avoided the acclaim of popularity, he won battles against calculation, he took treasures above it, he lived frugally, he died poor.

Ludlow was moved by the earnestness of my language and demeanour, and said gracefully, 'Sir! I perceive you are a military man; so was I, while I had any existence as an Englishman." "How! sir!" exclaimed I.

They under these stones," continued he, "inherit their place of rest: I come to seek it: and if rumours are to be trusted, I may fail to find it. Again I behold my beloved country in the enjoyment of peace and freedom. Much of my

designs, and labours, have been devoted to the consummation of this one event. How gladly have I bestowed them! how gladly shall I bestow the remainder. To see the country I have served by my life and writings, is an ample recompense for any service I could render her, and almost comforts me under the privation of friends, associates, and comrades, swept away by the storm that split our island and convulsed all Europe."

An old beadle at this moment twitched me by the skirt of my coat, and drew me aside. "Have a care," said he, in a tremulous voice; "that is old Ludlow. The tories would pink him, and the whigs poison him."

"Faith! honest friend," said I, "you describe the two parties better than anyone in the land." Then, turning to the general, I told him he had a right to reprove my forwardness; and in order that he might know on what person the reproof should fall, I gave him my name. He said many kind things, and added some compliments. I regretted that he was not received in the country with public honours, as having been commander in chief, and against a family then excluded by a majority of the nation, and now expelled by the whole. My indignation burst out against that wrangler and robber, Seymour, who a few days afterward drove him from the country, lest his virtues should be acknowledged, his sufferings pitied, his losses compensated, and his estates restored.

Penn. We may discourse on better people and better things.

Peterborough. We will then

Away to the valleys, the mountains, and moors. Pardon my bad singing. Even your mare flinched at it.

Our accounts of the Valdenses in England have never been explicit and particular.

Penn. Latterly the government has always been unfriendly to the growth of freedom in foreign countries, and to the purity of religion at home: wherefore, as we yield to the impulse it gives, their success or annihilation would concern fewer now than formerly. In the time of Cromwell this oppressed people was commiserated and protected.

Peterborough. I remember some verses written on their calamities by his Latin secretary, Mr. Milton, a strenuous advocate of their cause.

Penn. And of every cause in which the glory of God and the dignity of man are implicated. He spake with the enthusiam of a prophet, he reasoned with the precision of a philosopher, and he lived with the purity of a saint.

Peterborough. I love all great men, and hate all counterfeits of them, particularly such as are struck and milled at a blow in the royal mint. Cromwell does not displease me, though I should have fought against him, unless my uncle, who commanded the artillery under Essex, had led me preferably to that side.

Penn. Thou wouldst have judged ill in fighting

against him, for his side was the righteous one, the | Mind, I speak of the functions of a prince, not of side of the sufferer and the oppressed: and thou judgest no less ill in saying he doth not displease thee. He is thought to have been a hypocrite for the sake of power; whereas in fact he was sincere, until power by degrees made him a hypocrite. How little then of it should be trusted to any man, when the wisest, and the bravest, and the calmest are thus perverted by it! However, in no instance did he exercise his authority to the detriment of his country, which indeed he elevated as high in glory as the hereditary Charles immersed it in disgrace. So great and so desirable a prince as Cromwell never since the creation had been appointed by the Lord of it, to preserve the liberties and to moderate the passions of a turbulent, a factious, and a sinful people.

Peterborough. When so many high-minded men were against him, and those nearest him the most, I wonder how he could contrive to mount above them as he did.

Penn. Whoever is possessed of such a genius, or anything like it, and is resolved on deception, may rise to the first distinction: but neither deception without genius, nor genius without deception, will elevate him to that wide prospect of dominion, at which the tempter in his breast says, "This, O my worshipper, shall be thine."

Peterborough. In general there is as much difference between a usurper and a hereditary King, as there is between a wild boar and a tame one: but Cromwell had nothing in him ferocious; nor had Charles anything sordid, if we except the abandonment of his friends when they were distressed, and of his promises when they were inconvenient. I disapprove of the clownishness in some and of the levity in others, with which they treated the criminal on his trial; nor do I less disapprove of the slavish baseness, the corrupt sycophancy, with which in his prosperity the king was served by his equals: for above an English gentleman there neither ought to be, nor is there, in character and dignity, anything upon earth. The king is the work of our hands, we are not the work of his we existed before him, and shall exist after him: he may do much with us, without us nothing.

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Penn. In this thou art wise; and on this secure part of thy wisdom let thy bravery act and rest. Peterborough. I know not upon what principle the chancellor Clarendon called Cromwell a bold bad man, unless it were to persuade us that he had read a play of Shakspeare's; in which we find the same words, rather more happily applied. People are bad and good relatively and comparatively. Oliver would have been but a sorry saint, and no very tractable disciple or apostle; nor do I imagine that you would have admitted him without a scrutiny into the society of friends: but he was a good father, a good husband, a good companion, a good soldier, and (taking up now the point on which we are to consider him) he was certainly the best usurper, if you can call him one at all, and perhaps the best prince, that ever lived.

the accessaries, not of what belongs to the man or the philosopher. You will understand my reason for expressing a doubt of the Protector being a usurper. If he was one, so is the gentleman I helped to introduce from Holland, who is likewise a great man, and perhaps the next in dignity among our rulers. It is childish to talk of illegality because the army was the instrument. The army must always be the instrument in fundamental changes; and is never so well employed; not even in repelling an aggression. For we are liable to more mischief in our houses than out; liable to equal violence and greater depreda tion, and that depredation in costlier things; and the injury is the worse as coming from those about us, and trusted by us implicitly in our concerns.

Among such a people as the Valdenses, there is no danger of such a man as Cromwell obtaining an ascendancy. They warmed you; which is more than he ever did; I will answer for him.

Penn. The commands and the practice of our teacher do not permit me to applaud the bloodshedder, although in resistance. Cruelty, if we consider it as a crime, is the greatest of all: but I think we should more justly consider it, in men of education, as a madness; for it quite destroys our sympathies, and, doing so, must supersede and master our intellect. It removes from us those that can help us, and brings against us those that can injure us: whence it opposes the great principle of our nature, self-love, and endangers not only our well-being but our being. Reason is then the most perfect, when it enables us the most to benefit society: reason is then the most deranged, when there is that over it which disables a man from benefiting his fellow men and cruelty is that. We hold it unlawful to kill a fellow creature for any offence whatever.

Peterborough. But if the laws enact it, then surely it is lawful.

Penn. There is a law, above the passions, above the mutabilities of man, from which whatever is lawful must emanate. Herein the commands of God are clear and definite.

Peterborough. Some of them; others not; or rather they run quite contrary. You feel greater horror at murder than any people do, and yet you would punish it less severely.

Penn. I deem that offence the worst which tends furthest to deteriorate our social condition. Were it lawful to punish anyone with death, it would be the conqueror, holding in subjection the people that has not injured him, and that consents not to his domination. If a traveller, who has been robbed and bound by a thief, can unbind himself and recover his property, ye deem him justified in so doing, although he can do it by no other way than by slaying the thief.

Peterborough. Certainly; and praise his spirit.

Penn. If a prince exacteth from his people any part of their substance, without asking their consent, or forces them to labour or fight, ye would

deem that what is done by force may be resisted hope that, if the victory should be ours, the only by force.

Peterborough. Princes who levy taxes and troops despotically, may justly be killed by those who suffer under them, whether born in that condition or not but every kind of government has made conquests, and has retained them by treaty: these therefore are inviolable.

Penn. By whom were the treaties made?
Peterborough. By the governors.

Penn. But if the majority of the people, convoked and appealed to, did not consent, without force or fear, to pass under the new ruler, he who holds them in bondage may, according to thy principles, and according to worldly justice, be slain by any of the conquered. And until it is agreed and enforced, that no nation in Europe shall take possession of another, or of any part, international law will be no better than quibble and contradiction.

Peterborough. He must be a legitimate fool, and of the purest breed, who believes that the powerful will ever cease to exercise their power for its propagation.

Penn. Ye defend the violence done by system, and punish by the gallows the same violence done by poor wretches incapable of reflection; done perhaps from want of food, perhaps from neglect of education, criminal not in the robber, but in the ministers of the prince. If power is ever righteously to be exercised by one state toward another, it is in taking away the means of injustice and cruelty from the administrators, and in restoring to the people their rights. When they once have them, and find them acknowledged, they will fear to hazard the enjoyment of them, as they must do by assailing or injuring another state. For instance, if the French were free they would have no false appetite being slaves, they are restless for something to buoy them up from their degradation. They are yet to be taught that Honour may dwell in houses as well as under tents; and that, if they must boast for ever, they may boast of better things than having served.

Peterborough. Well said, my Quixote of orders grey! The next proposal I expect from you, is the settlement of differences in the moon; the second, the abolition of the slave-trade; and the third, of the Inquisition.

Penn. As to the moon, thou hast more to look for there than I have, and I should gladly see thee righted: but O that God would grant both those abolitions! I do indeed hold it just and reasonable in any powerful people to insist on them.

Peterborough. Insist! when a nation insists on anything against another, it declares war.

Penn. There is nothing in this life worth quarrelling for, and there is nothing to be gained by it in another yet, apparently in the present state of things, we never can be long at peace. Our quarrels are as frequent and as irrational as those of children. Since however the great evil of bloodshed must yet for some time continue, let us

punishment we inflict on the governors be the civilisation of the governed. Let us hope that we may exact the freedom of the Africans and of the Spaniards, and may empty for ever the holds of the slave-ship and the dungeons of the Inquisition. We have the same right to stipulate the one as the other, and a much greater than to demand the cession of a single village, or the transfer of a single man.

Abolish the slave-trade! Ah, who can ever hope it! Whoever shall effect this, will have effected more than the twelve apostles. They hut threw a stone at a sparrow, and did not bring it to the ground; he will have placed his foot upon a serpent, more venomous than ever was feigned by fear or poetry, and will have crushed it in all its folds from the setting sun to the rising. What in comparison have all the philosophers done, or what have all the religious? they have raised much dust, and have removed little. He indeed hath conquered his enemy who binds him by moral obligations; he indeed is great and good who knows how to make other men so; and he is in a worse condition than a slave who reduces a higher mind to slavery. Incessant horrors haunt him, and eternal punishments (if there be any such) await him!

Princes of the earth! will ye never hear a truth unless what is preached to you by your fellows at the scaffold? Have ye forgotten so soon your last lesson? Alas! must it be repeated to you?

Peterborough. The old admiral would not perhaps have been so civil as to ask the question of them. He would have preached to them when he had cropped the hair from both ears, and had erected a sounding board to his liking at Whitehall.

Penn. Fools! it is they who make such men as my father. He had his faults: but he feared God and loved his country. Let us honour him! I must ever do it.

Peterborough. And I too. I admire and venerate many whom I should be glad to fight against.

Penn. Strange creature! Are we then images of clay, baked by children in the sun, to be broken for their entertainment?

Peterborough. The first of us are hardly worth a serious thought.

Penn. And yet how much happiness might even those who are not the first of us, confer! Peterborough. I should have said enjoy.

Penn. I said it.

In the spirit of religion, which is humanity and nothing else, I may nevertheless demonstrate why these children of the mountains fought courageously. They believed that they were protecting the household and the house itself of God: they believed that their sufferings were trials, and that this life was given them for endu rance, in proportion to which should be their happiness in the next. Hope is the mother of Faith.

Peterborough. Who has a twin daughter very like her, named Folly.

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